Politics and Societies in the Early Modern World

Catalog description

In this seminar, we will discuss how early modern globalization affected societies and the ways their members and rulers made politics. Following a historiographical introduction, it is divided in three sections. In the first, we will concentrate on empires and kings in order to detect common features of dynastic power across the globe and to explore how such characteristics influenced each other. Second, we will shift our attention to citizens and the ways they made politics in their city-states. For a long time, research on citizenship has been confined to the post-revolutionary nation states. However, recent research suggests that urban citizenship has far deeper roots in medieval and early modern cities. Up to now most research has focused on urban centers in Western Europe and more precisely on the so-called urban belt stretching from Central and North-Italy, over Switzerland and Southern Germany to the Rhineland and the Low Countries. Comparisons with urban centers in Asia and the colonial Americas will be needed to test that view. In the third section, we will study the people who provided information to societies and decision makers. Often, they held multiple identities or they acted as religious or ethnic outsiders. Therefore, we call them, with a term borrowed from anthropology 'brokers'. Taken together, the analysis of these aspects will deepen our understanding of politics and societies in the globalizing early modern world. Thus, the seminar will contribute to a more comprehensive, less Europe-centered view on that period.